What is Reciprocal Teaching?
A high impact instructional practice for small groups of students incorporating four strategies of Predicting, Clarifying, Questioning, and Summarizing. The use of the four strategies together in one cohesive structure supports students' levels of comprehension.
Why is Reciprocal Teaching important?
Reciprocal Teaching supports teachers to explicitly scaffold learning and support students in developing metacognitive skills to become reflective of their own learning. Reciprocal teaching can increase engagement in learning, and can help students to become more strategic and reflective during reading resulting in increased levels of comprehension. The integration of roles and responsibilities during this collaborative process increases the sense of accountability for individual students.
How to use Reciprocal Teaching?
Arrange students into groups of four and assign the roles of Predictor, Clarifier, Questioner and Summarizer. One student can also take on the role of Team Lead or Team Facilitator to facilitate the group conversations
Provide an introductory activity, which could consist of a prompt, intriguing question, reading activity, or could be a question provided by a student from each group that they might exhibit some confusion about
Consider providing a graphic organizer to support students to write down notes during the reciprocal teaching process, and to use a structured note taking and annotation process
The Predictor will make a prediction of what the topic is about, based on the title of a reading passage, inference from the prompt, context of the problem provided, etc.
After completing the introductory activity, the Clarifier will generate discussion to promote clarity about the topic. Consider modeling a structured process to discuss with possible sentence stems
The Questioner will pose questions to the group, identifying parts that might be unclear, puzzling, or to make connections to previous concepts.
The Summarizer collects the ideas from the discussion, integrates them with the main points from the informational reading and produces a concise summary
The process can then be repeated to discuss the next passage in a reading, an additional problem or question, etc.